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I think discord will stick around, yeah, but it's competitors will also grow a lot more until someday, maybe in 5-10 years, Discord finds itself withering away in favor of some new app.

The thing is Discord isn't finished with upsetting people - it still has to do a lot more stuff to get more net income for their IPO. How they will do that without seriously annoying users is hard to say. The more they annoy their users the more the users flee, boosting the value of the competition.

Discord does have some user capture, but nothing like twitter's - where followers & networks are valuable and can take a long time to aquire - and twitter's competition was able to scoop up a huge number of outraged users despite even that. Granted - I think Twitter's changes annoyed people much more than Discord's.

> Discord does have some user capture, but nothing like twitter's

More importantly, Discord's communities are silo'ed, private by default, and administered and moderated by human beings with almost no oversight from Discord proper.

There is no equivalent on Twitter. On Reddit, going dark makes you subject to administrative subreddit takeover. But if someone runs a Discord community that they want to migrate to another platform, they could easily lock the entire server to posting and post a link to the alternative community. Done.

There's also really nothing to a community beyond its mods, its users, and maybe some bots. Reddit creates a record of EVERYTHING and in many ways those years of discussion are the sub more than the current users or mods alone. Discord is nothing like that, if you could get everyone on the same page a Discord clone would work just as well, and relatively seamlessly.

tl;dr Discord has a moat, but it's not very wide or deep.

That's not true. Plenty of Discord communities have dozens of channels with long-running post histories, pictures, FAQ content, beginner guides; server roles and titles, permissions, custom emoji, stickers, etc.

Migrating all of that stuff to a new service (which may not even support it all) would be a huge pain.

It isn't siloed though, not truly - not in the way Teamspeak or Mumble used to be, at least. Discord's global friends list is what will keep people from abandoning it in droves, unfortunately, and until Teamspeak et al sort that out it isn't changing.

EDIT: Maybe I completely forgot how Teamspeak works. It seems like there is a global friends list, but I can't remember that it was a thing back in the day (10+ years ago).

The discord servers my friends and I use are just for shit posting and using voice among like 10 of us. If it becomes annoying we can move to the next thing. We're all millennials. We can run whatever server if needed it's not a big deal.

If you meet somebody mid match in a game like Valorant or Overwatch, it's simple to give them a username and they can add you and you then choose to group voice call vs inviting them to a private server, especially before you know them very well.

Teamspeak, as far as I know, doesn't have a way to solve this.

I'll admit that this use case didn't really occur to me, because the signal to noise ratio is so damn bad in matchmade games these days. If I want to play a game on voice call with strangers, I go to the community space first and then organize a team there.

That being said, after thinking about it, I actually have done what you're talking about before - just not on Discord. When I find someone, I simply add them on Steam, PSN, or whichever account the game uses.

The friends list is inconsequential. It's for sending private messages to people you already know and met from a Discord server. Long running group chats are an aberration, people just start up micro-discords instead.

And that is what Discord alternatives will have to solve - the ease of setting up a new Discord "server" by any old random user is hard to beat in terms of convenience. Matrix is the only real alternative on that front.

However, if you have an established community and have at least a little hosting knowledge among the staff, the moat is shallow to nonexistent, and it's just a matter of how much of a pain in the neck Discord decides to be.

I think you're right about Discord.

Reddit never faced the same pressure. The API thing pissed off mobile users, but all of the Reddit alternatives, such as Voat, were hyper polarized politically and were not good destinations for most people. They collected the "worst parts of Reddit" rather than providing a place for the majority of users.

The same thing happened to Twitter. Bluesky is very polarized and constantly gets poked fun at because of it, even by left-leaning folks. Threads was a much more neutral and inviting space that doesn't force you to wear a particular set of politics on your sleeves.

Discord has a few (small) alternatives that aren't alienating or off-putting.

Reddit's api migration did not put a dent in their MAUs but it sent 250k users to the alternative platforms like Lemmy and pumped a ton of donation money and contributors into the ecosystem. Now Lemmy has maintained 50k MAUs for over 2 years and has gotten 100 times better as a product. So reddits API change grew its competition from a hobby project to an actual competitor.

I expect discords change will do the same.

I don't think Discord is going anywhere, but people always vastly overestimate the power of market leaders. Reddit didn't see a big change in MAUs but it did see massive declines in the amount of time spent on reddit per user and posting activity.

I could see Discord going the same way - declining interest from users while they keep it around for the few 'essential' communities/friends on the platform, but very little tethering them to it if a disruptive competitor comes along.

We get these articles everytime there is some controversy. We had articles about how Gitlab was crushed under the load of new users after Github was acquired by Microsoft, and yet Gitlab is further from being the market leader today than it was back then.

It's clear age verification is coming from a changing legal environment around the world. Discord may be preemptively moving, but any competitor service is eventually going to have to age verify users before they access adult content.

"Any competitor service is eventually going to have to age verify users before they access adult content."

Maybe but I just don't see this as a certain thing. The US may implement nation-wide age verification laws someday but it is a long ways from happening. Other discord-like software may be self-hosted by individuals, making enforcing age-verification difficult. There's nothing wrong with this. People would rather have a private place to chat as opposed to a place where your data will be observed by a big company and potentially sold or given to a hostile goverment.

Most of this has to do with GitHub relying on a benefactor with a de facto monopoly in order to subsidize their massive business failures and loses. I'm sure if GitLab never IPO'd and was in bed with a trillion dollar corporation the situation might be more comparable.

All you're doing is making a profound argument why GitHub should be divested from Github, WhatsApp from Meta, or AWS from Amazon. It's clear many tech companies would not be in dominant positions without the massive advantage of their respective monopolies.

These companies need to be broken up radically and it needs to happen soon.

>the waves of people leaving anything are always overblown

Digg, MySpace and Vine?

Old world decay model, new world is twitter or facebook. Mass user exodus to a point a platform is a genuine wasteland, this means bots get deployed to prop up metrics. The money doesn't come from users, but the beleif of access to them via a platform. As long as there is a appearance of consumer data/attention you can access, then everything is fine re: revenue. Dunno how discord will fudge things though, since discord doesn't quite (historically) fit traditional social media models so maybe you'll be right in the end.

> Not that I like or support them, but the waves of people leaving anything are always overblown

There can be 2 things.

It can be fantastic for small players to get an influx of customers from a major player thats listing. Its good and healthy for the market.

That doesnt mean that Salesforce/Microsoft/Reddit/Discord is actually going anywhere. But these are still great numbers for the little guys.

>I'm rooting for any sort of truly solid decentralized chat

That would be great. I remember cryptocat was pretty good. But IIRC it died.

> Look at Reddit after the API switch up

Market cap is half compared to all time high, and having old organic data that LLMs want to be trained on is saving them right now.